Winona Ryder on Anti-Semitism in Hollywood

Stand for Israel  |  June 23, 2020

While those of us who stand for Israel “never forget,” anti-Semitism is a problem around the world. Jews everywhere continue to face hatred because of their faith. And Hollywood is no different. Our friends at JTA tell us how actress Winona Ryder has opened up about the discrimination she has faced during her long career – simply for being Jewish:

Actress Winona Ryder said she was passed over for a movie role because the studio head thought she looked “too Jewish” and Mel Gibson once asked her if she was an “oven dodger.”

Ryder talked about her experiences with anti-Semitism in Hollywood as part of wide-ranging interview published in the London-based Sunday Times.

“There was a movie that I was up for a long time ago, it was a period piece, and the studio head, who was Jewish, said I looked ‘too Jewish’ to be in a blue-blooded family,” Ryder told newspaper.

The incident with Gibson, at a party in 1995, was first reported in an interview in GQ in 2010. Ryder said that when something came up in the conversation about Jews, the actor-director said, ‘You’re not an oven dodger, are you?’” – a reference to the ovens that creamated the bodies of inmates in Nazi extermination camps.